"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking."

I’m not normally one to pay attention to signs and portents. Perhaps I should be.

I took a quick weekend trip out to Indiana a couple of weeks ago. Flight out was fine: medium-sized jet to Charlotte, where I caught a medium-sized jet to Indianapolis. Smooth flights, no delays.

For the flight home, I made my connections through Pittsburgh. More reasonable departure time, shorter layover, substantially more reasonable arrival time. But, oops: I didn’t look very closely at the planes involved. Turns out that both of the flights were on tiny planes: only about 22 rows long, and each row consisted of one seat on the left side of the center aisle and two seats on the right. Worse still, although both flights were the same model plane, only the flight from Indianapolis was a jet – the other was a propeller-driven puddle-jumper.

The pilot wanted to leave Indianapolis early, due to the severe thunderstorms rapidly (and loudly) approaching from the west. And I suppose that pulling away from the gate at the scheduled take-off time qualifies as “early” for USAirways. Before we got to the runway, the skies opened up. We took off anyway, into the storm, and had a mighty rough ride for the first fifteen minutes, which is a pretty good-sized portion of the 55-minute flight. Up, down, up, dowwwwnnn, up, whoops! Way down. Urp. But the flight finally settled down, and we got into the Pittsburgh landing approach.

The view out my window on the approach was fairly repetitive: hill, golf course, water tower, hill, water tower, golf course, hill, etc. Finally we got set for wheels-down, and the last landmark off the left side of the plane was a hill, covered with little white buildings. The top of the hill was at window-level, so you had to hope that the pilot had the plane lined up properly. Thankfully, he did. As we passed the hilltop, I realized that we were a lot closer to it than I’d thought, and the little white buildings and spires on the hill actually turned out to be the gravestones and crypts in a cemetery.

Fine. Rush to the gate for the flight to Richmond. Get there just barely in time for boarding. Well, just barely in time to start waiting, as it turns out. They’ve decided that they have overbooked the flight by six customers. A flight with about 66 seats, you understand. So they want volunteers to step aside and take the next flight to Richmond, which will get you there around midnight instead of around 7:30. Ten minutes later, they ask again for volunteers. Ten minutes later, they ask again. By now, it’s already past time for wheels-up from Pittsburgh. One person volunteers. They ask again for volunteers, with the dual threats that (a) they won’t begin boarding until there is an appropriately small number of passengers and (b) if they don’t get enough volunteers, they’ll start bumping people. By the time it’s a half-hour past scheduled take-off, they grudgingly allow boarding to start. We all bolt for the plane and claim our seats.

Kind of a mistake, it turns out. A plane which is painted dark blue and which has been sitting in the strong July sun all afternoon turns into an oven. Especially when there’s no air conditioning on the plane. If you then load that plane up with more than 60 people, it turns into a mobile sauna. (Well, if it were moving, it would be a mobile sauna.) How many more than 60? By the time we finally took off, there were five empty seats. (And two of the filled seats were filled with USAirways pilots, dead-heading.) Somehow – between pre-boarding and post-boarding – the flight went from having 72 paying customers to having only 59 (plus the two freebies). Difficult to be successful at running an airline if you misplace that many customers at once. Add in the crew (I’m guessing 2 pilots and 1 flight attendant), and you get a total of 64.

So there we were, 61 passengers who had made a beeline for the plane, only to discover that it was about 120 degrees inside, and getting hotter. Minimal air circulation and no air conditioning. You can’t open the windows (all in all, probably a good design in an airplane). And the long wait inside the oven starts while USAirways looks around for the missing customers. Or something. They never actually told us why we were waiting, but wait we did. And the temperature went up. A half-hour later, I’d guess it was at least 140 degrees, and at that point, it really doesn’t matter if it’s “in the shade” of the plane’s interior. Everything that everyone was wearing was thoroughly soaked from perspiration. The flight attendant was as unhappy as the rest of us, and promised us cold drinks once we got up into the air (and not until). The pilot came on the intercom and assured us that once the plane was airborne, it would cool down.

We soon discovered what he failed to tell us: that when he fired up the engines, what minimal air circulation we had would go away, not to return until we hit cruising altitude, when the propellers no longer needed all the power that the engines could generate. And he warmed the engines up for 5 minutes – with the cabin door closed, of course – before we moved away from the terminal.

After we pulled away from the terminal, we stopped and waited a few more minutes, taxied a little more, waited some more, and finally took off. We got up about 2000 feet and leveled off, and the air conditioning finally kicked in, so the interior cooled off to a more reasonable level (and in this instance, “reasonable” means merely 105 degrees).

We did a slow 60-degree right turn, and I settled in to read my book. A few minutes later, I felt another 60-degree turn to the right, and tried to concentrate on the book. Or possibly to take a nap, no telling. After we’d been aloft for 20 minutes, I took notice of yet another 60-degree turn to the right (and realized there had surely been others that hadn’t impinged on my consciousness), and I could see a big city out my window; and you know? There really aren’t all that many big cities on the flight path from Pittsburgh to Richmond. And fewer still that have skyscrapers near the confluence of a couple of major rivers. And, hmm, that particular configuration of golf course, hilltop, and water tower looks awfully familiar. And while we’re at it, why are we still only about 2000 feet up? Other passengers have noticed, too, and are starting to murmur.

The pilot comes on: “You may have noticed that we’re still near Pittsburgh. When we got off the ground, we discovered that we have an instrumentation problem. So we’re going to circle Pittsburgh for another 20 minutes, land, and get the problem fixed.”

So we fly around for 20 more minutes, with a 60-degree right turn thrown in every few minutes, and eventually come back to my friends the water tower, golf course, and hilltop. And down we go to land, with the usual pre-landing instructions of putting the seat upright and the like.

As we land, we saw that the Pittsburgh airport had prepared a festive arrival for us, with a parade of yellow fire trucks beside the plane, pacing us down the runway with lights flashing and sirens blaring (presumably; we can’t hear them over the sound of the engines). I counted 5 hook-and-ladder trucks, 3 other fire trucks, a couple of ambulances, and a couple of pickup trucks painted fire truck yellow with the airport’s logo on the door. Very nice of them to have a parade for us, to make us feel better about having our trip delayed.

Oh, wait. Maybe that’s not why the fire trucks were staying so close to us.

The fire engines stay along side the plane until we hit the end of the runway, then they follow us almost all the way back to the terminal, before peeling off to go back to the airport firehouse. It’s chili night, I guess. We taxi back to the terminal we left from, and they open the door, but don’t let us de-plane. I imagine that they figure we would scatter and find another way to Richmond. (And what do you think happened to the air conditioning? Yep. Anyone who had gotten most of the perspiration evaporated from the first pass through the oven started sweating again.)

Oh, and once we come to a rest, the left-side engine starts smoking. Enough that you’d be worried if you saw that amount of smoke coming out of your car’s tailpipe, but not so much that you could legitimately call it “billows of smoke”. Certainly more smoke than I ever recall seeing come out of an airplane’s engine before, not that I’ve flown on propeller planes more than a dozen times. Perhaps you can imagine how calming it is for the passengers to see the engine suddenly start pouring out smoke when we’ve just been treated to a landing surrounded by fire engines. One of the dead-heading pilots looks at the engine and tells us not to worry, that’s common. The murmuring dies down some, only to start to build up again as it sinks in that it’s such a common occurrence on this airline’s flights to have the engine smoke profusely that it isn’t worth having a mechanic come look at it.

A guy in a suit watches as mechanics do something to one of the panels in the cockpit and possibly to something around the front wheel well. The pilot in the passenger section identifies him as being the head of operations for the Pittsburgh airport; presumably the head of operations for the airline, although that’s a big job since Pittsburgh is a US Airways hub. Still, you can tell he isn’t head of public relations for the airline, as he doesn’t pop on board, tell us what’s going on, instruct the flight attendant to pass out cold drinks (ideally with a slug of scotch in each), and wish us a happy flight.

Forty-five minutes of waiting passes. Slowly. Finally, it looks like we’re ready to take off. I’ve kept a close eye on the two dead-heading pilots, using them as my guides to staying on the plane. I figure that they know more about the safety of these planes than I do (and I truly don’t want to know it if they don’t), and if they’re willing to chance it for the flight to Richmond, I guess I will, too.

No problems on the flight to Richmond; at least, none that I could tell. Sure, the left engine started pumping out smoke when it was shut down at the terminal in Richmond. And sure, there’s no way to tell whether it was doing that all the way from Pittsburgh. But we arrived safely, albeit more than 3 hours late.

And if I had been driving from Indianapolis, and started home at the same time that I started out for the Indianapolis airport, I’d have probably driven up to my house about the same time that I actually arrived home from the airport after the plane trips. Hmm. Something else to consider.